James Packer could renew his love for Sydney after casino sale

With the $3.3 billion sale of his interest in casino company Crown Resorts complete, James Packer will turn his attention the city where he grew up, writes Annette Sharp.

With the $3.3 billion sale of his interest in casino company Crown Resorts complete, James Packer will turn his attention to making peace with the home town that nurtured and shaped him before the pair became estranged.

Packer insiders yesterday said the billionaire was committed to finding a way to heal the wounds of the past so that his three children can have a connection to and relationship with Sydney.

As the billionaire celebrated his incredible private windfall yesterday at his $50 million seaside compound in Cabo, Mexico, family sources told this newspaper the sale of Crown to US private equity giant Blackstone would be “cathartic” for Packer, who has been in a downward spiral privately since committing himself to the dream a decade ago of building and owning a global casino empire.

Although he has no plans of residing in Sydney full time again and spends most of his time in the US, Packer is committed to the idea of repairing his troubled relationship with his home town Sydney, a city three generations of Packer men have worked obsessively to make great and in which his elderly mother Ros still lives.

Also still living happily in Sydney is Packer’s only sibling Gretel, with whom he’s also still working on a rapprochement following the bitter breakdown of their relationship in 2014 over the division of their late father Kerry Packer’s multibillion-dollar estate. Sources close to the family say the relationship between the siblings was now “better than ever”.

James Packer is yet to spend a night at his lavish $72 million two-storey apartment atop Crown Resort’s One Barangaroo. Picture: Aaron Francis

Packer, who owns a lavish $72 million two-storey apartment atop Crown Resort’s One Barangaroo, is yet to spend a single night at his grand new Sydney residence.

A friend yesterday confided the businessman is only now – following the damning findings of last year’s Bergin inquiry that found Crown unsuited to holding a casino licence in Sydney – able to imagine a time when it might be possible for him to visit Barangaroo regularly.

“He’s only seen it when it was under construction,” the friend said. “Now he can start to contemplate spending time there.”

A recent trip home to Sydney by his ex-wife Erica and the couple’s three children, Indigo, Jackson and Emmanuel, is said to also be motivating Packer’s decision to bury the hatchet with Sydney, a city the businessman felt compelled to abandon after he started falling out with lifelong friends around the time his second marriage, to Erica, ended in 2013.

Despite reports stating otherwise, Erica and the three children did not stay at the apartment during their visit, choosing instead to stay with family elsewhere.

Mr Packer said on Friday Crown Resorts is in “safe and capable hands” with Blackstone.

“Crown Resorts is an outstanding company and I am so pleased it has moved into such safe and capable hands,” Mr Packer said.

Crown employees as Blackstone formally takes ownership of the company.

“Blackstone is one of the world’s best property and investment firms and they clearly have seen the long term potential of Crown’s assets and operations. It’s exciting to think of Crown’s next chapter and I am confident Blackstone will take good care of the company.”

Mr Packer added it had been an incredibly honour to work with the employees, management and the board of Crown Resorts both past and present: “There have been ups and downs and challenges, but today’s final sale to Blackstone is confirmation that we have built one of the country’s best tourism, entertainment and leisure companies and I am extremely proud of that, thank you to everyone at Crown.”

Blackstone has appointed former Las Vegas Cosmopolitan chief executive Bill McBeath as Crown’s new chairman, replacing Ziggy Switkowski.

The NSW Independent ­Liquor & Gaming Authority has enforced a raft of strict conditions on the conditional approval it granted Crown to open Barangaroo’s gaming floor. Crown’s ability to adhere to them will form part of ILGA’s final determination on suitability when the conditional approval period ends in about 18 months.

Crown’s chief executive Steve McCann said the new Sydney casino would form a test site for its rebuilt international business, which will scrap the controversial use of junkets, or organised tour groups that attracted high-rollers and exposed the company to money-laundering and other crime.

— additional reporting Jared Lynch

Crown sale puts deep pain to rest

By Annette Sharp

Having spent the past decade working slavishly to realise his dead father’s dream of owning a casino in Sydney, James Packer is this weekend finally able to put the glittering expectations, emotional collapses, madness and headlines of the past decade behind him.

It was in February 2012 that Packer first revealed plans to take up the family chequebook and go after his late father Kerry Packer’s thwarted 1994 ambition of owning a rare Sydney casino licence.

Twenty years earlier keen gambler Kerry had been beaten to a casino licence by Showboat-Leighton which would go on to build and operate Sydney’s first casino, Star.

Seeing and experiencing his father’s furious disappointment first hand, Packer would not abandon his father’s dream but merely place it on the backburner — a project worth revisiting later he calculated — when he was suitably cashed up and in a financial position to do so.

This would be dependent on the sell-off of the family’s vast Australian media assets.

Less than two years after Kerry’s 2005 death, his son was selling off the Nine Network for $4 billion and laying the groundwork for the later sale of the family’s magazine division, ACP, for $500 million in a deal finalised in September 2012.

By that time Packer’s plans for a global casino empire, including interests in Macau, were fast taking shape.

A month earlier, in August 2012, Packer had revealed plans to build “the best hotel in the world” — with a VIP-only casino — on Sydney Harbour at Barangaroo.

It would be Packer’s “legacy” to Sydney, media reported.

It would also prove an exercise in, if not madness, then the closest thing to it.

The same year Packer’s “legacy” was announced, a jubilant Packer was photographed regularly with his wife and mother of his three young children, Erica.

But within a year the Barangaroo dream had claimed its first casualty — the Packer marriage.

Life at the top proved too bumpy for marriage.

By the time the controversial casino licence was approved in November 2013, Erica and the couple’s children were living in LA following the couple’s separation in mid-2012.

By May 2014, Packer and his longtime best friend David Gyngell would be throwing wild punches on a Sydney street.

Model Miranda Kerr would months later deny it had been over her.

“They weren’t fighting over me,” she said, assuring fans she and Packer were just “friends”.

The collapse of lifelong friendships and facial bruising aside, life looked good for Packer, whose estimated worth was put at $6 billion.

He had invested in a film production business with controversial LA filmmaker Brett Ratner, and was making plans to upgrade his fleet of private jets, donate $200 million to charity and by late 2014 was spruiking plans to crack the Las Vegas strip following the purchase of a 34 acre vacant site.

Following a brief fling with British actor Charlotte Kirk, the woman who helped bring the curtain down on the career of Warner Bros. chairman and CEO Kevin Tsujihara, Packer found new love with pop star Mariah Carey, a close friend of Ratner.

Moving in increasingly influential circles, by 2016 Packer could be found rubbing shoulders with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his son Yair one day and hanging out with Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese at his latest venture, Studio City in Macau, the next.

It seemed the world was Packer’s oyster, until it wasn’t. In late 2016 the arrest of 19 Crown Casino staff in China would be the beginning of the end and as his casino empire began to unravel, so too would his health, with Packer checking into a Boston hospital in March 2018 to deal with mental health issues.

Four years on, the Crown chapter can be reduced to a pile of rubble, a dizzying and unedifying experience and a $3 billion bank deposit.